Arabic lessons

[Harold Schiffman]

 Arabic Lessons By ROBERT F.
WORTH<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/robert_f_worth/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
Published: January 6, 2008

One dark afternoon last winter, after too many hours spent studying Arabic
verbs, I found myself staring uncomprehendingly at a video on my computer
screen. An Arab man was holding forth tediously, his words half drowned by
the rain outside. At first all I could make out was the usual farrago of
angry consonants and strangled vowels. No progress there. Then, at last, the
letters lighted up at the back of my brain.
  Oliver Munday

"I understand what he's saying!" I shrieked to the empty apartment, spinning
backward in my desk chair. "I understand every word!" I felt a warm rush of
gratitude to the speaker, a bespectacled doctor. It made no difference that
he was Ayman al-Zawahri<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/z/ayman_al_zawahiri/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
Al Qaeda<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/al_qaeda/index.html?inline=nyt-org>'s
No. 2 man, or that he was threatening to slaughter large numbers of
Americans. He spoke a slow, clear *fusha*, the formal version of Arabic I
had been struggling to decipher on the page for 10 hours a day. Even better,
his words matched my limited vocabulary: *arsala*, "to send"; *jaish*,
"army"; raees, "president." I was almost drunk with exhilaration.

Moments later the darkness dropped again. The terrorist disappeared, his
rarefied language replaced by the clipped, quotidian accents of a political
analyst. This was closer to the ordinary Arabic I would need for my work,
and I understood precisely nothing. Was I wasting my time?

Learning Arabic has been like that: moments of elation alternating with
grim, soul-churning despair. The language is not so much hard as it is vast,
with dozens of ways to form the plural and words that vary from region to
region, town to town. With every sign of progress it seems to deepen beneath
you like a coastal shelf. It is only small comfort to read about the early
struggles of distinguished Arabists like Gertrude Bell, who complained that
she could pronounce the Arabic "h" only while holding down her tongue with
one finger, or Tim Mackintosh-Smith, who writes of years spent in an
alternate world called "Dictionary Land."

But the rigors of study were a small price for the chance to catch up with
my surroundings. After spending the better part of two years as a reporter
in Baghdad, I was tired of playing the doltish Westerner, eyes always
darting blankly between translator and interviewee. The scattered phrases I
knew seemed only to underscore my ignorance: *Wayn alinfijar?* I'd say
("Where's the explosion?"), or *Shaku maku?* ("How's it going?"), and I'd
get a condescending pat on the back. When my bosses offered a year of
intensive language training, I jumped at the chance.

For anyone who knows only European languages, to wade into Arabic is to
discover an endlessly strange and yet oddly ordered lexical universe. Some
words have definitions that go on for pages and seem to encompass all
possible meanings; others are outlandishly precise. Paging through the
dictionary one night, I found a word that means "to cut off the upper end of
an okra." There are lovely verbs like sara, "to set out at night"; comical
ones like *tabaadawa*, "to pose as a Bedouin"; and simply bizarre ones like
*dabiba*, "to abound in lizards." *Dabiba* (presumably applied to towns or
regions) is medieval, but I wouldn't put it past Dr. Zawahri to revive it.

The language can also be surprisingly vague to a Western ear. I was always
troubled by Arabic's tendency to elide the distinction between "a lot" and
"too much." I will never forget hearing an Iraqi friend, as we walked down a
crowded Brooklyn street together, say loudly in English, "There are too many
black people here."

At the same time, all Arabic words have simple three- or four-letter roots,
with systematically derived cognates that allow you to unfold a whole range
of meanings from a single word. The word for "to cook," for instance, is
related in a predictable way to the words for "kitchen," "dish," "chef," and
so on. Arabic speakers are often dismayed to discover that the same
principle is less common in English.

As the months passed, the sounds of the language were gradually transformed.
Arabic's hard "h" letter, so difficult to pronounce at first, began to seem
like a lovely breath of air, as if countless tiny parachutes were lifting
the words above their glottal base. The notorious "ayn" sound, which often
takes months for English speakers to produce, lost its guttural edge and
acquired, to my ear, the throaty rumble of a well-tuned sports car.

Soon I began marching into the Arabic markets on Atlantic Avenue in
Brooklyn, near where I live, and testing out my textbook phrases. Generally
I was met with a confused look and then a smiling apology: "We don't hear
too much *fusha* around here." Linguistically speaking, what I had done was
a bit like asking an Italian for directions in Latin. Modern *fusha*, also
known as Modern Standard Arabic, is a modified version of the Classical
Arabic in the Koran. It is the language of public address, and of any
newscast on Al Jazeera<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/al_jazeera/index.html?inline=nyt-org>and
other Arabic television stations. It also corresponds to the written
language, and any educated Arab can understand it. Arabs have enormous
respect for *fusha* ("eloquent" is the word's literal meaning), especially
in its fully inflected Koranic form; that is why Al Qaeda's leaders, like
clerics and most political leaders, place great emphasis on the classical
idiom.

But the language of the street is different. The colloquial versions of
Arabic are derived from *fusha*, and they are dialects rather than wholly
separate languages. Still, the gulf can be substantial in vocabulary as well
as pronunciation, and takes getting used to. One of the pleasures of
learning Arabic is hearing long-familiar words in their natural context,
shorn of the poisonous ideological garb they often bear in this country.
Once you begin to do that, American attitudes toward the language itself,
along with all things Arab and Muslim, can begin to seem jarringly hostile
and suspicious.

To take a recent example: Last winter, New York City announced plans for a
new Arabic-language public secondary school in Brooklyn. An aggressive
campaign against the school soon sprang up, despite the uncontroversial
presence of Chinese, Russian, Spanish and other dual-language schools in the
city. Opponents and local newspaper columnists began branding the (as yet
unopened) school a "jihad recruiting center" and a "madrassa" and demanding
it be closed. For Arabic speakers, the very title of the "Stop the Madrassa"
campaign — now national in scope — is bound to have an uncomfortable
ring. Madrassa
is the Arabic word for "school"; it could not be more wholesome. But as the
school's opponents know, in this country it has taken on a far more sinister
valence, thanks to press reports about religious schools in Pakistan that
are said to teach
Taliban<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/taliban/index.html?inline=nyt-org>-style
militancy. The school's principal was later replaced after a fracas over
another Arabic word, *intifada*, that has taken on a meaning here entirely
different from the one it has among Arabs.

One has to wonder whether these attitudes have inhibited our ability to
train more Arabic speakers. Although enrollments in postsecondary Arabic
study more than doubled from 2002 to 2006, the attrition rate is high, and
the number of students who persist and become truly proficient — much harder
to measure — is very small. The government and military are still struggling
to find the translators they need. The reasons for this failure are many,
and inseparable from the Arab world's long history of troubled relations
with the West. But alongside them is the simple fact that even with the best
of teachers — like mine — the language requires a degree of patience and
commitment that verges on the absurd. "Don't worry," one of my teachers told
me half-jokingly. "Arabic is only hard for the first 10 years. After that it
gets easier."

Robert F. Worth is the Beirut bureau chief for The Times.



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/books/review/Worth-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin


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